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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Hardware

2.4 Keyboards

The quintessential input device, the keyboard, despite its similarities to the typewriter, is nevertheless the subject of great confusion. Some of the most important, basic keys are misunderstood. Some even fail to recognize that hitting a letter on the keyboard causes the same letter to appear on the screen.

We have a service contract at a local college. I got a call one day from someone who said that their Mac IIsi was having a problem. Upon questioning him, he said that whenever he typed on the keyboard, the image on the monitor was shaking. All sorts of monitor problems ran through my mind. I asked him if it was only when he typed and he replied yes. Well, since it was a contract, I figured we'd better go see what was happening. My tech called me about ten minutes after arriving and reported that the problem was not the computer, but his desk. The desk vibrated every time he typed on his keyboard. I am still shaking my head on this one. The sad thing is that this guy has "Dr." in front of his name and is a professor at a major college.

For a computer programming class, I sat directly across from someone, and our computers were facing away from each other. A few minutes into the class, she got up to leave the room. I reached between our computers and switched the inputs for the keyboards. She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed look on her face. She called the teacher over and explained that no matter what she typed, nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking red-faced. I started to type, "Leave me alone!"

They both jumped back, silenced. "What the..." the teacher said. I typed, "I said leave me alone!" The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything to it, I swear!" It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The conversation between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing five minutes.

Etc. Finally, I couldn't contain myself any longer and fell out of my chair laughing. After they had realized what I had done, they both turned beet red. Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class.

Many people have called to ask where the "any" key is on their keyboards when the "Press Any Key" message is displayed.

I have a friend who just bought a computer and was instructed to load a program by typing "A:" and then the name of the program.

My friend told me it would not work because his keyboard was no good. He said he couldn't type the "dot over dot thingie" and that every time he tried to type the "dot over dot thingie" he kept getting the "dot over comma thingie" no matter how careful he was to press only on the very top of the key.

When I taught him about the shift key, he thought I was a genius.

One user told me he couldn't find the 'OK' button on his keyboard.

I had a call from a customer who was complaining that when she typed, the wrong letters came up on the screen. After some investigation, I learned she had pried off all the letter key caps off her keyboard and rearranged them in alphabetical order. You'd think she'd have figured out the problem herself when her computer stopped working afterward.

This, while fixing a problem starting up the system:

I received a call from one of the top managers in our company.

I turned to my co-workers and said, "You won't believe the call I just got..."

One user noted that MAC keyboards are typically relatively small, but that IBM keyboards are "big" things with "keys all around the top and down the sides" and so forth. He figured that this might be one of the reasons why IBMs and MACs "don't like to talk to each other."

I was helping an executive-type over the phone with a VMS command. I kept giving him a command to type, something like "whois xyz1234". He kept getting an error back. Finally I asked him to read exactly what he was typing, letter-by-letter, "w-h-o-i-s-s-p-a-c-e-x-y-z-1-2-3-4". I told him to type a blank instead of the word "space." He then asked me how to do that. Trying not to laugh, I explained what that long key at the bottom of the keyboard was for.

I teach an introductory programming course. The first assignment is to write a program to evaluate an integral. A common question I get is, "Where's the integral key?"

I once watched our new system administrator trying to bring one of our servers up. He needed to type "i386" which was part of a path name.

This guy calls in to complain that he gets an "Access Denied" message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his username and password in capital letters.

Back in the good old pre-PC days we sold a system that required the user to hit Ctrl-A in order to sign on. We sold one to some outfit in Canada. Well, trying to get them going over the phone took an hour. We'd say, "Hit Ctrl-A," and they'd say, "Ok, we hit Ctrl, eh? And nothing happened, eh?"

I saw a woman sitting patiently at her desk, staring directly at her monitor, doing nothing. Figuring something was up, I looked over her shoulder to see that she had typed her name on the command line. I asked what she was waiting for, and her reply was that she was waiting for the computer to log her on. Only problem, she hadn't hit the "LOG ON" key. She'd have sat there all day.

Another user called in one day with an installation problem. I talked him through the process of getting to a DOS prompt and asked him to type, "D I R Space A Colon" and press Enter. I heard 5 slow erratic key clicks followed by a very long pause. Finally, he asked, "What's the colon look like?" I told him it's the key with one dot below another dot. "Oh!" he exclaimed, "The two-dots key! Why didn't you say so?"

I had a customer the other day that called the "plus" sign a "prostitute" sign.

A friend of mine had just discovered email, and I noticed him pause for a few moments, examining the keyboard. "What's wrong?" I asked. He said, "Where's the smiley key!?!"

I worked at the computer help desk at Dartmouth College last year. Once, one of my co-workers finished a call, then looked at me blankly, then started laughing. The caller had spilled soda on her keyboard and removed the bottom row of keys on her keyboard to get the liquid out. She called us so we could tell her the order of that row of keys.

A user called me with problems installing her PC Access and it sounded like it might be a defective floppy, so I had her get to a DOS prompt. I told her to type "D I R Space A Colon" and press Enter. After a long pause she asked, "Do you want anything in that space?"

I work in Front Line Support, and usually we dial into our customers sites to troubleshoot problems. One evening a co-worker was not able to dial into a customer's site, so he was working with the customer by phone and trying to walk him through displaying system messages. The user was in the computer room where there were multiple servers.

I started hearing a very faint beep when I was typing, but it was not consistent, and since it was so faint, it was hard to tell where it was coming from. I pondered, confirmed that it wasn't any of the obvious problems, and then started thinking that maybe my keyboard was messed up. I knew better, but maybe there was a small alarm inside my keyboard...an "excess wear" indicator, maybe? (I know, but I didn't have any better ideas.) Finally I decided to sit down and figure it out once and for all. I took the keyboard off the desk to begin my detective work and found, underneath the keyboard, a digital thermometer. It had been sitting under there the whole time. My typing was hitting the on/off button on the thermometer, causing it to beep.

I find it curious how you almost never see "press any key" instructions that are honest enough to say, "except Shift, Caps Lock, Control, Alt, Num Lock, Scroll Lock...."

It's really bad when the computer does something stupid. Presumably, the programmers of the operating system or system software would know better. Many computers are known to report the following error message when the keyboard is not plugged in:

"Error #101: No keyboard. Press F1 to continue."
...or some variation thereof.

Email from a friend:

"CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"

I work on the help desk of a small ISP. Yesterday I had a phone call from a customer wanting to know how to set up his mail. The mail server address contained a hyphen.

He seemed to know what that was, so we proceeded to enter the rest of his settings. On completion, he got an error message saying he could not be logged in to the mail server. I took him back into the settings and asked him to read out what he had entered for the mail server name. When we got to the point where the hyphen should be, he said "squiggly line."

He tried again and still couldn't connect. Back into the settings we go. When he got to the point the hyphen should be, he said it was a "horseshoe-like thingy." We tried again. Next time it was a "diagonal line." I don't remember how many times we went through this. Finally I had to direct him to where the hyphen key was physically located on the keyboard.

My father was just getting into using a computer. He loved Solitaire and would play with it for hours, so I thought I'd set him up with a different game. I set up Nascar Racing, and off he was, having a great time, until the race ended. I heard him pressing keys and getting a bit frustrated. Finally he asked me for help. He said that the game was broken. It turned out that the game was instructing him to "Press ESC," and he was hitting the 'E', 'S', and 'C' keys in succession.

My friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He noticed a young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations with her arms crossed across her chest and staring at the screen. After about 15 minutes he noticed that she was still in the same position only now she was impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help and she replied, "It's about time! I pushed the F1 button over twenty minutes ago!"

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